Brexit Strategy

Journalist Laurie Penny examines the dull, disastrous austerity decade before 2016's Brexit-vote, and traces the Leave victory to a wider series of losses across Britain: of an effective welfare state, of a left opposition strong (or interested) enough to defend it, and of hope for a brighter future - apart from a rented room in Edinburgh.

Live from São Paulo, Brian Mier reports on the wave of strikes against neoliberal cuts in Brazil - in opposition to laws setting the retirement age above life expectancy, and in spite of the American and Brazilian corporate media downplaying mass protest numers and dismissing the harshest edges of the Temer government's post-coup takeover.

Sociologist Thomas Shapiro examines the toxic nature of inequality in America - as a result of government policies in a time of increased precarity and restricted mobility for many Americans, and as the source of America's racial wealth gap, a deep structural divide that robs minorities of equal access to opportunities and threatens democracy in America.

Writer Thomas Frank shifts through the wreckage of the Democratic Party in the Trump Era, and finds a group of failed politicians unable to see the deep unpopularity of their own policies, or a path beyond serving the narrow interests of the elite professional class they've served since the Clinton years - with a generation of disastrous results.